954: 10 Trends for Week 14

JJ Zachariason (0:11)

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason in this episode 954 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast sponsored by Underdog. Thanks for tuning in. There are tons of snake drafts you can join right now over on Underdog. For not just this week's slate of games, but for the playoffs as well. That's right, playoff best ball is here, and there's one contest, The Gauntlet, that's a $25 entry with $2 million in prizes. Now, if that's too high of an entry point for you, you can also join the $3 per entry Little Mitten. There's $50,000 in prizes in that one. There's always something at Underdog that will fit what you're looking for. If you never played over there, make sure you sign up right now with promo code LATEROUND. You can get a nice deposit offer with that promo code. You also get access to my rest of season rankings. That's underdogfantasy.com, promo code LATEROUND.

I sent a tweet and I posted on Blue Sky the other day about how I was having this discussion on the LATEROUND Fantasy Football Discord about this year's wide receiver draft class, the 2024 class, and how honestly it's kind of been a disappointment. And that tweet was met by a lot of people saying that this year isn't any different than other years. And that that's just an overreaction by me. So I want to first say that I'm just looking at this descriptively right now. Generally, yes, how a rookie performs during his first year is predictive of future years, but we still have a month to go. There's still a month left in the season, and rookies tend to do better during this portion of the year. With that being said, thus far, things have been pretty underwhelming for this rookie class, and I want to provide some data to show you what I mean. This year's class has 11 wide receivers who are drafting the first and second round. That's on the higher end compared to all draft classes since 2011 Now, as of right now, 36% of those players are averaging 10 plus PPR points per game. Since 2011, that's a totally average number. Now, when looking at players getting to 12 plus PPR points per game, it's 27% in this year's class. Since 2011, that number has typically been around 24%, so, again, pretty much average. And then only Malik Neighbors has gotten over 14 plus PPR points per game. The Lad McCalky and Brian Thomas have a shot at that. So basically, when looking at the top part of the draft, these wide receivers are performing pretty typically. But that doesn't even account for the fact that three of the wide receivers were selected in the top 10 I'm not even giving the other classes that benefit of the doubt. I'm not weighing draft capital here. A second rounder is the same thing as a first rounder when looking at things this way. Meanwhile, there really haven't been any big hits outside the first two rounds. Among the wide receivers who were either drafted or at the NFL Combine since 2011, so the wide receivers in the ZAP model, of those who went after round two, we typically see 0.7 of them give us a season of 12 or more PPR points per game as a rookie. So 0.7 of them per season. So those are basically third rounders and day two players, and then some undrafted players too. This year, we don't have any. We don't have any who are really that close. We have some guys who have been nice surprises, like Devon Vailay or Jalen Coker. But those players are not giving us like a Pukinokua type season or even close to that. We don't have that kind of player in this draft class. We don't even really have half of Pukinokua. My tweet wasn't to say that this class is bad, and there's way more analysis to be done. This is just an initial look. But my tweet was to say that compared to expectation, where a lot of these guys were drafted early, they've been disappointing overall. And as you guys might remember, I talked about over the offseason how this year's class, it had poor analytical profiles versus their actual draft capital. Now, I don't think we can confirm things one way or another right now. But I do think we're at least trending to a more disappointing class than a superb one, aside from the handful of studs that it did give us.

Now that was a different type of trend than usual to kick off today's show. Let's go back to some of the more standard trends. We saw Isaiah Pacheco back in action against the Raiders. And it was a total split backfield for the Chiefs. Kareem Hunt played one more snap than Pacheco and he ran double the number of routes. I'm not sure it was all surprising, but it's clear that they may not go all in on Pacheco being a workhorse right away coming off that injury. That's something that Dr. Jeff Mueller, he talked about that on Late-Round Perspectives about a month or so ago. I would anticipate Pacheco getting more and more work as the season moves on though. Let's talk about the Chargers backfield without JK Dobbins. It was kind of as expected. Gus Edwards had a 52% Snapshare. Kamani Vidal, he was half of that at 26%. And then Hassan Haskins was at 15%. Meanwhile, Edwards led that backfield with 12 routes run according to PFF. Vidal was at 6%, Haskins at 3%. I think a lot of people might be surprised by the routes run here. But the Chargers didn't face a bad game script. Those aren't a lot of routes in total. So, I would imagine if they do face a bad game script, we'll see more Kamani Vidal on the field. But it's definitely a messy situation overall. I also want to talk about the Panthers' backfield, because I think people are making a lot of assumptions about what's going on there given Chuba Hubbard's Week 13 performance. I think there's some reason to be concerned about Hubbard moving forward, but it depends on where your expectations are at. Because if you think that he's toast just based on Week 13, I'd chill out for a minute. But if you think Week 13 was a nothing burger, and he just had a down performance, I think there's more to it than that. Hubbard did see a 67% running back rush air, his lowest since Week 2 He didn't see a single target. Those are both not great. What's also not great is that Jonathan Brooks had more expected fantasy points than Chuba Hubbard did. That's according to PFF's model, meaning where the two were seeing touches, Brooks got the edge. He was supposed to score more fantasy points, despite less work on the ground. But a lot of that's going to be driven by receiving work. Like I said, Hubbard didn't see a target. Jonathan Brooks saw 3, but here's the thing. We want to look at how predictive that is. If we see the exact same usage week over week, chances are Chuba Hubbard is going to see more targets than Jonathan Brooks, because against the Buccaneers, Hubbard had 30 routes, and Brooks only had 6 And Hubbard played 40 more snaps. That's why I don't think you need to go overboard and think that Hubbard is some bench player now. But we should still be aware that Brooks can and probably will continue to see more work in this backfield. I haven't really talked about T. Higgins on the show this season. Like even in the preseason, he was just kind of there. I was at market with him, and that's where I ranked him. I wasn't too high, I wasn't too low. But Higgins is having a really good season when he's been healthy. He's currently averaging a 31% target share per game rate. He's averaging over 18 PPR points per game. Who knows if that's going to keep up? But those are by far the best numbers that he's seen in his career. He knows that he's about to get paid this offseason. I didn't have Jaleel McLaughlin on the 15 Transaction Show this week, but I probably could have mentioned him in hindsight. McLaughlin saw a season-high 64% running back rush share against the Browns. Now, a snap share was still just 36%. His route participation still pretty low at 14%. But I do think that he's someone to watch out of their buy in Week 14